There is an increasing trend in using consumer electronic (CE) devices such as, for example, televisions, portable media players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and the like, for acquiring, viewing, and managing digital media. Typical digital media may include photos, music, videos, and the like. Consumers want to conveniently enjoy the digital media content with their CE devices regardless of the storage of the media across different devices, and the location of such devices in the home or outside of the home in remote servers.
In a networked environment, digital media may be transferred from one device to another via wired or wireless media transfer protocols. A typical mechanism for transmitting digital media in real-time is over a wired Ethernet connection using a real-time transport protocol (RTP) that typically runs on top of a User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The video and audio data according to this protocol is generally time-stamped and interleaved in a single stream so as to allow a receiving device to play the video and audio in a synchronized manner. It may be desirable at times, however, for a device to transmit the movies, music, pictures, and any other kinds of digital media, in any desired combination, without interleaving them into a single stream, and having the different types of media played at the CE device in real time. For example, a user may want to view pictures with music playing in the background without having the music synchronized with the pictures.
Accordingly, what is needed is a generic media transfer and associated protocol that easily supports the transfer of different types of media independently from each other. The generic media transfer and associated protocol should be flexible enough to allow the media to be streamed and displayed at the CE device without having it synchronized if no synchronization is desired.